Is It A Good Idea?
Let The People Sing What's The Big Idea? Is It Allowed? How Does It Work? Is It A Good Idea? What Will Others Say? Job sharing is certainly an idea...but is it a good idea? If it is a good idea in general, is it a good idea in the particular case of a Euro MP? Is the time right or is the idea decades ahead of its time?
Timing matters in politics. There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Moreover there are the political calculations. It may be a good idea for Sweden but is it good for the Swedish Green Party? Will it improve the party's chances in the June 1999 Strasbourg elections? Should this be any part of the calculation?
J.K.Galbraith in some autobiographical reflections pointed out that even though Adlai Stevenson was heavily defeated in his run for the US Presidency, his campaign was not a failure. He put forward policies and floated ideas that were taken up by other candidates in the years to come...something candidates intent on victory seldom hazard.
However there are two excellent policy reasons why the Swedish Green Party should take up job sharing as their special issue in the June 1999 Strasbourg elections. Future Work and Democracy are two of the half a dozen or so issues that the Swedish Green Party would like to have on the agenda throughout the election.
And you cannot talk about work without bringing up the subject of money...which then touches on a third issue...the mad scramble to turn the whole of Europe into 'Euroland' paying its bills (the good thing about a common currency) and having its money issued (the bad thing about a single currency) by grey eminences somewhere in the dark satanic vaults of the Euroland Central Bank (whoever they are...and wherever in cyberspace that might be).
In an election campaign, this setting of agendas can be critical to the outcome of the election. Sustainable economics is on message...but it will only get a hearing when it is called good food, good work and good money.
Sustainable economics may be the best programming language but 'the good life' is the user interface. What could be better than to give the idea an attractive (and biogradable) packaging in the form of several (well-rehearsed) working couples...sharing their job.
And although in the immediate short-term, idleness is the problem and a shortage of jobs is one cause of the problem, it is the structure of work into jobs & careers and the quest for square pegs to fit all the round holes that underlies our 'work problem'.
But look a little deeper and it becomes clear that artificially dividing everybody's life into the three boxes of schooling, working and retiring is the real start of the problem.
If a society then seeks to issue money only as a wage to those with a job in the middle box then that society will crash sooner or later. Later is now here and brings us unfortunately into some very muddy waters.
It seems that when money is issued by a government and paid out to its poorer citizens as a social wage it is to be regarded as a very bad thing...tax payers money, welfare spending etc.
But when private corporations ladle out debt to a country's citizens this is to be regarded as a good thing...so good in fact that the same tax payers money is used from time to time to provide corporate welfare payments from the public purse to impoverished private banking companies.
It is a strange world we live in. But there is more.
If wages increase the cry from the boardroom barons is "inflation!" When share prices sky-rocket however their public relations people are quietly instructed to put the word out that "wealth is being created". Very strange.
Meanwhile nobody must say a word about the private income distribution taking place behind our parliaments' backs as usury transfers vast quantities of wealth from the wage earning classes to the super-rich and their global casino economy with its transnational corporations, military industrial complexes and highly paid advertising agencies, accountants and clever clerks. Fact is stranger than fiction.
As for the long term, what needed to be said in 1939 when J.B.Priestley had his fictional professor address the board of United Plastics in East Dunbury (see preface) still needs saying 60 years later.
What has to be rooted out is still the old economic heresy, the idea that men are primarily producers and consumers, and are only real human beings in what is called their spare time. There is not work time and spare time. There is just time.
The second policy reason why job sharing could be an election winner for the Swedish Green Party is because it goes to the heart of our ideas about democracy.
The European Union tells us that it suffers from a democratic deficit. Now democratic deficits are to democracy what environmentalism is to ecology. Skilfully deployed job sharing can be used to raise the issues of democracy and its intellectual offshoots, representative democracy and direct democracy.
Once this subject is broached it does not take much ingenuity to move the conversation over to the notion that 300 million people represented by 600 Euro MPs is incompatible with any theory of representative democracy yet devised...it is a contradiction in terms.
From here it is only a short distance to arguing that growth by division is the only sane way to bring the Baltic States into our western economic world. And the best way for this to happen would be to break up the EU so that we in Sweden can go our own way and get on with the really important business for us of forging ties with our neighbours by way of a confederation of Baltic states....working in a tapestry of problem-grappling 'supra-national' think-groups while sub-contracting 'convergent problems' for action to those with the competence to tackle them.
But meanwhile the least we can try to do as a party is to halve the democratic deficit by making the decisions being made more truly representative. And if we wanted to go further, then one way of doing this would be to bring democracy in much earlier on in the process instead of trying to squeeze it in at the end of the political production line.
Instead of Euro MPs in Strasbourg rubber stamping what has been pre-determined elsewhere, each vote could be brought within the embrace of a process of democratic consensus-seeking among the people who 'own' that vote. Job sharing could be an important first step in setting up such a process.
But what about the 'job-share ticket'. Who? Whom? Grön Ungdom is not a party within a party. This is in sharp contrast to their role in the other Swedish political parties. Grön Ungdom are not used and manipulated into positions and policies that suit the tactical power moves of factions higher up in the party hierarchy. Grön Ungdom is not there to teach obedience, discipline and 'real politics' to young aspiring party politicians. And nor does Grön Ungdom run around with its own secret agendas. It believes in the same ideals and pursues the same policies as the party as a whole. The Swedish Green Party is a democratic party in a way that puts all the other parties to shame...and there has recently been some academic research to confirm this.
No other Swedish political party would dare to put out a gender- and an age-balanced list for the Strasbourg elections. Only the Swedish Green Party could possibly consider it. And so the Swedish Green Party is uniquely capable of gaining electoral mileage by doing so.
And in the musty corridors of Europe's imperial palaces what a breath of fresh air the energy and hopes of young people would bring, countering the politburo mentality and the self-satisfied cynicism that currently prevails.
Young people do things differently. They move differently. They react differently. They will be be there to reap the rewards of their endeavours.
These young Swedish Green job-sharers would thrust a dagger into the very heart of the careerism and ageism that is the bane of present-day European political culture...and a rose and a smile in the faces of the 'can't do's, won't do's and shan't do's.
Other Euro MPs will be compelled to ask themselves the question.
Who do I really represent?
What a powerful statement all this will send to the Swedish electorate.Perhaps they will even begin to attend elections again...and believe in politics and their politicians?
Is this too much to hope?
Let The People Sing What's The Big Idea? Is It Allowed? How Does It Work? Is It A Good Idea? What Will Others Say?